Seven years after a van ran into him, leaving him with a dislocated hip and 25 broken bones, Stephen King still aches. His gait is stiff and awkward. His lank frame is still a little hunched. But it seems to suit his manner: a curious combination of languor and frustration.
He will be 60 next year and this looming milestone has got him worrying about his legacy, his place in the canon of literature. In some ways this might seem perverse. He is, arguably, the most popular novelist in the world – the 50 or so books he has written have sold more than 300 million copies worldwide. He is also, probably, the world’s richest author – according to Forbes magazine his annual income is about $US50 million ($A65 million).
And as if this wasn’t enough, some of his stories have been turned into classic films, including The Shining, The Shawshank Redemption and Misery. The trouble is, his particular genre – the gothic thriller – has worked against his critical reputation. He tells me wearily that he is bound to be described as a ‘horror writer’ in the first line of his obituary. He wants to be taken more seriously, is that it?
‘That doesn’t bother me,’ he says, ‘it’s never that I’ve felt that much need for respect. My family has been eating. My house is paid for. And, in the end, after you’re gone, the work finds its own level. The critics don’t have much say in that. Some of the books which everyone sneered at for being disposable, such as Agatha Christie, have actually survived the longest on the bookshelves. No, what drives me crazy is when I am treated as a sociological artefact. No one wants to be reduced to a human beetlewig or a Halloween mask.’
His point is that when you are a famous author ‘everyone wants a piece of you’, even when you are dead. This is, in part, the subject of his latest novel, Lisey’s Story.
Lisey is the widow of an award-winning author. Two years after her husband’s death, she is going through his personal effects. Scholars are circling like vultures wanting to know if there are any unpublished manuscripts left in his study, any memorabilia, any incunabula. Lisey, hearing this as ‘incuncabilla’, begins to think of them as ‘incunks’.
‘I sent an early draft to an academic who has written a lot of books about my work,’ King says with a lugubrious grin, ‘and he didn’t get back to me. I think he took it personally. I think he thought I was suggesting he was one of the incunks, one of the crazy academics …’
King’s relationship with the academy is uneasy. When, in 2003, he was awarded a National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters – one of the highest honours an American writer can be accorded – he gave an ungracious acceptance speech in which he accused the literary establishment of ‘tokenism’.
‘You can’t sit back, give a self-satisfied sigh and say, ‘Ah, that takes care of the troublesome pop-lit question. In another 20 years or perhaps 30, we’ll give this award to another writer who sells enough books to make the bestseller lists.’ It’s not good enough.
‘Nor do I have any patience with or use for those who make a point of pride in saying they’ve never read anything by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins Clark or any other popular writer. What do you think? You get social or academic brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture?’
The literary establishment declined to be cowed. Harold Bloom, one of America’s most distinguished scholars of literature, declared the award ‘another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I’ve described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls,’ he said, ‘but perhaps even that is too kind.’
It sounded like intellectual snobbery. Equally, King’s sense of injustice sounds like an inferiority complex, despite the staggering superiority of his book sales.
‘That award nearly killed me,’ he now says. ‘I was determined I was going to accept it and make my speech. It needed saying. Two days later I was in hospital.’ He stayed there for two months with pneumonia. ‘The whole thing was an outgrowth of the road accident. My lung had collapsed and the bottom part of it had not re-inflated, but no one knew that. It stayed collapsed and got rotten and infected the rest. I had the thing with the tube in the chest. I thought I was going to die.
‘My wife Tabby came into the hospital and said, ‘I want to use this time to re-do your office.’ At that point I was so full of dope and tubes, I didn’t care. But when I got back from the hospital she said I shouldn’t go in there, to my office, because it would be too disturbing for me. So of course I went in there and it was like the Christmas Carol, the ghost of Christmas yet to come. It was like having a vision of the future. I was standing there thinking this is what it will be like, not this time but within the next 20 or 25 years. I will be in a coffin and Tabitha will have rolled up the rugs and will be going through all my effects, all the papers and unfinished stories. This is the final act. The clearing up after a life. I remember my brother and me doing it when my mother died of cancer.’
Stephen King married Tabitha Spruce in 1971. He had met her in the library at the University of Maine, where they were students. They live in Maine to this day – in Bangor – and have three grown children. She is also a novelist. Although he insists that the character Lisey in his new novel is not his wife, he does acknowledge that his book is a homage to the ‘invisible’ wives of famous authors.
‘The book is a celebration of monogamy, in a way,’ he says. ‘It is also about how even in the most intimate relationships we are always holding something back.’
We can never be wholly known? ‘Exactly. I think of my wife as holding a deck of 52 cards – if you ask me how many she is showing me I wouldn’t know. We are as close to each other as two people can be, but one can never be sure how much you do and do not know about another person.
‘I’ve been married 35 years so I guess we know more about each other than a lot of couples do. But even we don’t know everything. Some couples, I guess, give up trying to know. They give in and their marriage ends in divorce due to lack of interest, or the other partner straying outside the marriage. But sometimes creative people get creative about their marriage and find ways to revitalise it.’
Did his accident change his relationship with his wife? ‘It made me appreciate how vulnerable we all are. For a while I became overly protective about my family, especially when they walked on the street. I remember vividly – the way you remember traumatising incidents – the first time they let me out of the hospital after the accident. I couldn’t go out the front because there were all these fans and press waiting. So they took me out the back in a wheelchair to this loading bay. My wife had been able to get an apartment next to the hospital – one of the advantages of money – and I saw her walking towards me down the street and I shouted: ‘Stay on the sidewalk, Tabby! Look both ways before you cross!’ My heart was pounding with anxiety.’
I ask if there was an understanding between them that Tabitha would play the invisible spouse, that she would support his career from the sidelines.
‘No, I don’t think any woman makes that deal, or man in the case of Denis Thatcher. No one writes in their yearbook: ‘I want to marry a man known worldwide as a bestselling author so that my chances of being divorced from him when some famous actress catches his eye go way up’.’
Have any famous actresses caught his eye? ‘There are temptations when you are off on tour and doing the conventions. All sorts of temptations on offer, plenty of groupies. But what I mean is: no wife wants to become a Little Miss Nobody aged 42, traded in for a trophy wife. But what helped me personally in this respect was that my father deserted my mother when I was three and I saw what my mother’s life was like after that – what the consequences were when the man leaves.’
King felt ashamed at school about not having a father, he adds. He also recognised that his mother felt ashamed about being abandoned. But he doesn’t think he has tried to make amends for his father in his own marriage. ‘You mean like making amends for all the wronged women in the world? No, that’s too big a job, even for me!’
It was Tabitha who rescued his first novel from the bin when, in 1973, he threw it away in disgust. The book turned out to be Carrie, his first bestseller. Tabitha has also had to put up with her husband’s stalkers over the years. Once she heard the window break only to look up and see a man standing with what he claimed was a bomb. It wasn’t. He was an escapee from a mental institution who was convinced that King had stolen the plot for Misery from him. Another stalker claimed that King had flown over her house in a U2 plane and stolen her thoughts for The Shining. A third, a man in California, became convinced that King had murdered John Lennon, in a conspiracy involving Ronald Reagan.
It was Tabitha, too, who helped King overcome his addiction to drink and drugs. ‘Cocaine seemed to help at first,’ King says. ‘It seemed like a really good energising drug. You try some and think: wow, why haven’t I been taking this for years? So you take a bit more and write a novel, and decorate the house, and mow the lawn and then you are ready to start a new novel again. I just wanted to refine the moment I was in. I didn’t feel that happiness was enough: that there had to be a way to improve on nature.
‘As an older, wiser and sadder man I realised you can’t cheat nature. You take a hit of cocaine and it makes you a new man, but the first thing the new man wants is a hit of cocaine. Basically, I was an addict. I would take anything. In the daytime I used to be pretty straight, not getting blotto until five in the afternoon. But by the end I was a round-the-clock drink-and-drug addict. I rewrote one book – It – in a blackout.’
With Tabitha’s help he started going to AA and NA meetings in 1988. ‘By the time I had the road accident in ‘99 I had been clean and sober for 11 years. But then the doctor asked me where my pain was on a scale of one to 10 and I said 11, and he offered me a breakthrough, time-release pain killer called Oxycon.
‘So I took the pills until I didn’t need them any more. I continued to take them because pain is subjective. But the addict part of my brain began inventing pain just to get these painkillers so I could have more of the drug. I had to kick it the way a junkie kicks heroin. It was a two-week process. I didn’t sleep for two weeks. My feet twitched uncontrollably – that is why it is called kicking the habit, your feet literally kick out. It was horrible.’
His only addiction these days is to his work. The addiction is to the pleasure he gets from discovering plots, bringing characters to life and seeing what will happen to them.
‘Philip Roth has a great line in Everyman,’ he says. ‘Amateurs wait for inspiration, the rest of us get up every day and go to work. That is a good line in an uncharacteristically bad piece of work. Work is the clear channel I can go to.
‘After that bout of pneumonia back in 2003 I picked up one of those hospital bugs and couldn’t keep food down. I lost 15 kilograms. Yet even in the worst days of that illness, even when I was vomiting, I was still able to write. That was when I started Lisey’s Story, my best book. I think it’s my best book. Even when I felt dizzy and weak, the words were always there for me. The writing was the best part of the day.’
As a writer, he continues, he has to have an understanding wife – because the writing process can be selfish. He has to disappear into a world of his own.
‘I get under her feet. When I’m writing in the morning, she stays out in the garden or does her own writing, or worries about the Republicans getting back into office. In the morning I work for three hours then go for long walks in the afternoon – my thinking time. As I walk, I try to guide my otherwise ungovernable mind back to the story I’m working on, looking for a hook.
‘When I’m not working, my mind doesn’t take kindly to being unhooked from its dope. I get migraines and nightmares. Very vivid. It’s almost like the DTs, like my mind and body is trying to scare me back to work. And once I’ve got back to work,’ he adds with a slow grin, ‘I can pass on my nightmares to everyone else.’
J.
James Blunt
It could be the homes around the world; his military bearing; or that he’s our biggest musical export since Elton. For whatever reason, being called annoying, a philanderer or – worse – middle class doesn’t exactly keep James Hillier Blount awake at night. Nigel Farndale met him
It’s not the sight of the groupies that haunts me, but the sound, or rather the absence of sound, as they ghost past us on their way up the stairs to the dressing-room. It takes me a moment to figure out that the reason they aren’t talking to each other is that they don’t know each other. One of the band members, the keyboard player, I think, has picked them from the audience on the basis of their looks. Half-a-dozen of them, all in their late teens and early twenties, and all, surprisingly, in pretty frocks, as if they were going to a Sunday school meeting. They have been separated from their friends like lambs weaned from their mothers. The silence of the lambs.
The ‘us’ they are filing past is James Blunt and me. He has a bottle of beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and not a hair in place – tousled just so, like a Renaissance painting of John the Baptist – but they don’t realise it’s him because he has changed out of the suit he was wearing on stage and is now in jeans, T-shirt and leather jacket, as well as a pink feather boa and star-shaped novelty sunglasses. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This is the end of the day; we need to go back to the start, well, to the middle, when the seats are empty and the Texan sun is at its most unforgiving.
A barefoot and unshaven Blunt is wearing normal sunglasses and shorts as he plays his piano, strums his guitar and sings his plaintive songs into the microphone for the sound check, all the while looking out with his soulful eyes over an empty, open-air arena in Houston. At 5ft 7in, he’s not a tall man, but he has presence and an unaffected manner – a certain maturity, too, one that you wouldn’t normally associate with a pop star in the ascendant.
But then he is 34 and this is his second career, his first being as an officer in the Household Cavalry. He joined after graduating from Bristol University with a degree in sociology. He became a champion skier for the Army and not only saw active service in Kosovo, but also guarded the Queen Mother’s coffin when she was lying in state.
Tonight he will be supporting Sheryl Crow, though, since his second album ‘All the Lost Souls’ and the single from it, ‘1973’, went straight to number one in America, he is arguably the bigger act these days. Indeed, not since Elton John has there been a more successful British singer-songwriter in the States.
His first album, ‘Back to Bedlam’, also went to number one over here, as it did in 18 other countries, making it the biggest-selling album of the millennium. It even entered the Guinness Book of Records as the fastest-selling album in one year. But it was his first single that really put him on the map. You’re Beautiful became the sound of that summer. It was everywhere, and still is – having become a favourite at weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs. I even heard a brass band playing it at an agricultural show in the Yorkshire Dales this summer.
As well as millions of sales, James Blunt has won Brit awards, Ivor Novello awards, MTV awards and various Grammy nominations. In terms of credibility, he’s headlined at Glastonbury and won the respect of the world-weary music press. Yet not everyone loves him, as he points out when we get something to eat in the canteen area back stage.
‘After Back to Bedlam really started selling,’ he says, ‘there was this sudden aggression towards me in the UK, for whatever reason, and that focused my mind, made it clear to me what I was doing and why I wanted to do it. I write songs for myself. I don’t write them for you, or for anyone else, I write them because I have experiences that I need to process. I don’t have the answers all the time, but I do have lots of questions, and I express them in the songs I write.’
He is, I think, alluding to a poll last year of ‘the most annoying things in life’, which put him at number four, just behind cold-callers and queue-jumpers. ‘I haven’t met anyone who voted in the poll, have you?’ he says when I mention this. ‘That poll probably came from a website that was after some publicity. You and I could do the same poll very quickly right now and it would count as a poll. We could do one about annoying newspapers, for example. I promise the Sunday Telegraph wouldn’t be in my list. My parents take it.’
His father, a retired colonel in the Army Air Corps, manages his son’s finances. His mother arranged the purchase of his six-bedroom villa in Ibiza (he also has a chalet in Verbier and recently bought a place in Chelsea). ‘I’m not married,’ he says, ‘and so the support structure in my life is my parents. I’m closer to them now than I have ever been.’
He certainly isn’t married, as the photographs of him emerging from nightclubs with various high-profile women on his arm attest. Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was probably the best known socialite, Jessica Sutta, of the Pussycat Dolls, the most glamorous. He also seems to be photographed regularly cavorting on beaches with bikini-clad models such as Petra Nemcova, whom he dated and then dumped – unceremonious dumping being his way of ending relationships, according to the tabloids. He once said he found himself in a swimming pool in LA with nine naked women. ‘I was the only bloke. It was the only time I wished my mates were there, purely to spectate. I had arrived. It was a moment.’
Now he says of the tabloid interest in his peripatetic love life: ‘Last week I went to my home in Ibiza and was photographed by the paparazzi in my swimming trunks with girls. What is the point of that? I’m not that bothered, but maybe the media should be concentrating more on global warming or the Russian invasion of Georgia.
‘Looking at me in my swimming trunks is not a great sight. It’s a waste of time. There generally is a long lens pointing at me wherever I go, these days. I’m comfortable with it. I appreciate how things work. But my record label said something about my always being photographed coming out of nightclubs and I thought, “But this is what I do. I was doing it before the second album came out, so what is different now? You didn’t tell me to stop then.” I’m not going to change my life because of these people. I don’t see why I should.’
His label also gets him to dye his grey hairs and be enigmatic about his love life, which is an old tactic dating back to the Beatles – they had to pretend they didn’t have wives and girlfriends so that fans could fantasise they were in with a chance.
Actually, at the time of going to press, Blunt seems to be going out again with one of his old flames, Verity Evetts, an Oxford-educated barrister. He has also stayed friendly with some of his other exes, the socialites at least. He told one – an ex who got married not long ago – that he doesn’t feel ‘centred’ at the moment and would like to get married as well. Then again, he also said that he never tires of singing You’re Beautiful night after night because it gets him laid night after night.
Either way, he tells me he has grown used to the idea that his mother will probably find out from the papers what he has been up to, and with whom, before he has had a chance to tell her. ‘And my [two] sisters are quick to email me about things in the papers, laughing their heads off. I get healthy, ritual abuse from them, and give it back myself.’
As we are talking, I can’t decide whether the way Blunt smiles all the time is disarming or disturbing. He’s like a victim of a religious cult, smiling at the beginning of the sentence and at the end. I guess he has a lot to smile about, but also I sense a great deal of insecurity to disguise.
Then, I’m distracted by the sight of Sheryl Crow playing table tennis across the room. She has been holding her adopted son in one arm as she bats with the other, and now, even more distractingly, she is heading straight for us. ‘Are we going to have one of our little conversations on stage again tonight, James?’ she says. ‘That flirting thing. I think it worked well last night.’
They discuss the duet they will sing – a cover of Cat Stevens’s The First Cut is the Deepest – then we both watch her shimmy away, her blonde curls bobbing. ‘She’s very down to earth,’ he says. ‘I’d met her a couple of times, which was why she asked me on this tour. We do end up playing a lot of table tennis on the road. We’ve done 117 shows so far this year, in 117 cities, and there are a lot of hours to fill in the day.’
As he sleeps on his tour bus with his band, one city tends to blur into another. When I joke that he is in Cincinnati now, he looks genuinely confused. ‘No, this is?… Oh, right. Actually, I always get the tour manager to say where we are just as I’m going on stage. I still managed to get it wrong the other night, saying “Hello Dallas” when I meant Austin. I’m surprised I got out alive.’
He is funny on the subjects of things that go wrong. ‘People are normally surprised by my show, which is more energetic than you might think. Jumping on the piano. Jumping out into the audience and running up and down the aisle high-fiving them. But going off the stage can be quite dangerous. I broke my finger once. My legs carried on when I jumped off, and I smacked down on the ground. The spotlight was on me, and when I got back to the piano I hit the wrong note and thought, “Why did I do that?” And I looked down and saw it was because my finger was broken, sticking out an angle. Look,’ he says holding it up. ‘It’s still crooked.’
On another occasion, in Chicago, he jumped 8ft off the stage. ‘When I began running to the audience, a security guard stuck his arm out and I thought, “Does he want a hug?” Then next thing I know he’s rugby-tackled me. He wouldn’t release me and I was screaming in his ear, “I’m the f—ing singer.” I had to wait for the other guards to pull him off.’
I would have thought Blunt’s training in unarmed combat would have helped. I presume he still works out. ‘No, never. Couldn’t handle it. Too boring. I am a hyperactive person though.’ He likes an adrenaline rush, as well, having recently bought an 1100cc Moto Guzzi V11 Sport motorbike. There’s also the skiing, which he still does, and the riding. Actually, he tells me, he never really liked horses before joining the Life Guards. So why did he join that particular regiment?
‘Well, it is a reconnaissance regiment.’ But they are all so tall in the Life Guards, did that not make him self-conscious? ‘Some are. The Foot Guards tend to be taller regiments, though. The Life Guards take a few shrimps, as well. Besides, they are on horses, so height isn’t so important. Also being in that regiment had the benefit of being in Knightsbridge. I got a chance to be in London and meet people in the music scene.’ And groupies, as it happens.
As he paraded up and down the Mall in plumed helmet and shiny breastplate, girls would stick their phone numbers down his knee-length boots. But it was his time in Kosovo that really made girls swoon. He used to strap his guitar to the outside of his tank, because there wasn’t room for it inside. He had learnt to play the violin at five, the piano at seven and the guitar at 14, while a pupil at Harrow.
He writes his songs on piano and guitar. ‘But mainly guitar because it is easier to carry around. It’s like a child messing around with a toy. If a tune comes to me I don’t record it instantly. I think if I remember it, then it must be worth remembering, and if I forget it, then it was forgettable.’
Does he have any anxiety dreams about forgetting lines or chords? ‘Not yet. Perhaps I will tonight. Perhaps you’ve jinxed me. But audiences aren’t judgmental, and if things go wrong and you can look them in the eye, that is fine. The only people who are judgmental are the journalists. I will be conscious of you being there in the audience judging me.’
Blimey. Sorry about that. Is it true he signs breasts? ‘Not that I remember. Not that I’m fussy what I sign. A lot of men started coming to the shows after I appeared on Top Gear last year. That was such fun. I spun the car five times. I thought I might as well make the most of it. I am competitive.’
He recorded one of the fastest laps, but I’m surprised blokes didn’t think him manly before that, given his tour of duty in Kosovo. ‘It’s because I sing songs that are heart-on-your-sleeve and therefore I must be overly emotional. Nothing I can do about it. I could pose more, but I am comfortable with my masculinity.’
He has said that his lyrics are autobiographical, in which case, are we to assume that the lyric on his new album, ‘I killed a man in a far away land’, means he killed a man in a far away land? I only ask because in the past he has said that he would never try to exploit what he went through, what he saw. ‘You should ask any soldier how many lives he has saved. How they do it is no one else’s business. What I took from my experience in Kosovo is that you are told from one day to the next who your enemy is and it keeps changing. That’s what is happening in Iraq, too. I believe in looking people in the eye, looking for the common humanity.’
He is a great believer in looking people in the eye. He will use the phrase again later and it seems to reveal a Christ complex, or a John the Baptist one. That direct and challenging stare of his. It would also explain the hair.
It is time for him do some photographs before he goes on stage and, endearingly, he says he is ‘not fussed’ about the grooming he is offered before they are taken.
On stage his features contort with passion when he sings. The big video screen goes in tight on his face. His voice is by turns soft and tremulous and forceful, but always high. Having seen him in concert once before, a couple of years ago, I notice the tone of his banter has changed.
‘Wow it’s hot tonight,’ he says now. ‘I’m surprised any of you are wearing any clothes. We could all take them off and get friendly.’ It is suggestive, designed to get the teenage girls in the audience screaming. Before he used to joke about his ‘girlie voice’ and taking helium to get it that way, and being ‘a bit wet’ and the ‘housewives’ favourite’. I think now he has realised that, actually, he is a proper musician, a popular one, too, and that he doesn’t need to apologise for it.
Afterwards, back in the dressing-room, he strips to the waist as he talks because he wants to take a shower before going back on to do his duet with Sheryl Crow. ‘Things got a bit hairy out there when I jumped into the crowd,’ he says. ‘Did you see that? Some thought it was some kind of sport to grab me.’
I watch his duet from the side of the stage and notice he whispers something in Sheryl Crow’s ear and then she starts running her hands over his trousers suggestively, patting them. Afterwards, I ask what he said. ‘”Is now a good time to ask for your phone number?” She was checking my pockets, pretending to look for a pen.’
He shows me round the gold-coloured tour bus where he will be sleeping tonight as they drive to their next gig in Dallas. It is full of hi-tech equipment and is nicely air-conditioned but there isn’t much space in the bunks. ‘We do live in close proximity,’ he says. ‘Some of us stay up late. This is the crew end, they have to get up early.’
Where do the groupies go? ‘Never have groupies on here. Never. They’d only get in if we invited them in. But we’d only ever invite friends in.’
Does he sleep OK? I heard he has to take sleeping pills. ‘It is a bit of a rough sleep, but better than a hotel and taking planes all the time because you have to get to the airport two hours early, which is miserable. Then your flight gets delayed.’
He is drinking champagne from a plastic cup. ‘This is for your benefit,’ he says. ‘The tour management went out and bought a bottle of champagne because he thought I should be seen drinking it. Better for my image. Isn’t that sweet? Normally, we drink vodka and beer. In fact, I think I’d rather have a beer, now. Want one?’ He opens a well-stocked fridge then takes me to the back of the bus where there is some seating space. He has one small case which he pulls out from a cupboard. It continues a few pairs of socks, T-shirts and a spare pair of jeans. No photographs or mementos. ‘This is all I have for 14 months on the road,’ he says. ‘I’m not known for style.’
Does he know how much he is worth? ‘No I don’t, not very interested in it to be honest. I travel with hand luggage only. That is why I always seem to be wearing the same clothes in photographs. If a tabloid says my clothes aren’t fashionable or my hair looks stupid, I really don’t worry about it. Don’t have any hair gel.’
In London, he takes the Tube or the bus. He prefers pubs to restaurants. When he goes to Ibiza, he flies easyJet. Still, that’s at home. Presumably on the road he can afford to be more self-indulgent.
Another lyric that we can only assume is autobiographical is ‘I’ve taken a s—load of drugs’. It is. Though his only comment on the subject is that he has ‘a comfortable relationship with drugs’. His relationship with fame is less comfortable. Oscar Wilde said there were two forms of tragedy: not getting what you want, and getting it. Is that how it felt for him when he went to number one? ‘Actually, I don’t think I had been dreaming about it. Certainly, I hadn’t anticipated being so recognisable so quickly.
‘I do remember getting a phone call from the record company, who said both the single and the album have gone to number one, and thinking, “S—, this is not what I expected.” I hadn’t prepared myself for it. Number two is great. Number two is nice. I sensed then it would mean having to change from being a musician to being a celebrity and that that would be a change for the worse. Fame doesn’t affect me, but it does affect everyone else around me. As for celebrity, it is the worst invention of the modern world. Gossip columns treat your life as if it were a cartoon. Relationships reduced to cartoons.’
Although there are other public-school bands around at the moment – Radiohead, Coldplay – Blunt seems to have suffered more than most from a perception that he is too posh to be credible. His family name is Blount (and his middle name Hillier), but he changed it to Blunt to sound, well, blunter and more proletarian.
When he tells me he would nevertheless still send a son of his to Harrow – ‘I think I would. I think I would. Public schools make individuals rather than sheep’ – I ask what he makes of the mood change now that the old Etonian David Cameron has made it OK to be posh. ‘Is it? I must come back to Britain immediately. Is it really safe to come back?
‘It’s not a dirty word to be posh, people come up to me and no one gives a damn if I’m posh. It’s about having a normal conversation and looking people in the eye.’
We head back to the dressing-room where he puts on his feather boa and novelty sunglasses then we wander back downstairs to have a word with Sheryl Crow, who is signing autographs. This is the moment at which the keyboard player says: ‘This way to the good-time room girls’ and the silent groupies dutifully appear.